I'm the founder of WorkplaceTrends.com, a research and advisory membership service for HR professionals. I also wrote the New York Times bestselling book, Promote Yourself, and the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0. In 2010, I was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 List and in 2012, I was named to the Forbes Magazine 30 Under 30 List.

Chase Jarvis: How He Became The Photographer Everyone Wants To Work With

I recently caught up with the talented Chase Jarvis, who is well known as a visionary photographer, director, and fine artist. Jarvis has won numerous awards from Prix de la Photographie de Paris, The Advertising Photographers of America, The International Photography Awards, and numerous photographic trade magazine throughout the world. Earlier in his career, as a filmmaker of short films, he worked with major brands such as Apple, Starbucks and Nike, as well as successful artists including Pearl Jam. Jarvis has created three books, including the more recent Seattle 100: Portrait of a City, and an iPhone application called “Best Camera”, which was the first to allow users to share images through social networks using the app. Aside from taking pictures for fun, he has spoken in five continents, launched the very successful creativeLIVE.com and hosts Chase Jarvis Live. To follow his updates, you can subscribe to his blog and follow him on Twitter @chasejarvis.

Chase Jarvis

In the following interview, he talks about how he got started in his career, how he’s stood out in the competitive world of photography, the inspiration behind his business, the technologies he’s paying attention to right now and his best advice.

Dan Schawbel: You went to school for philosophy but ended up with a career in photography. How did that happen and has philosophy helped you at all throughout your career?

Chase Jarvis: Yeah. Philosophy helped me a ton in finding photography. It helped me be honest and direct with myself and it was the route that inspired me to skip out on further traditional education, to ditch medical school and bail on a PhD in Philosophy of Art. In dropping out of all that, I learned a lot – certainly more valuable stuff than I’d have learned by staying in school.

On reflection, my background in philosophy actually helps me every day. It taught me to think critically about life, about art, about culture, and about the nature of happiness. I also think my educational path points to an all-too-familiar pattern within our culture — one so widespread it’s become an epidemic. Namely, that degrees have become a metric for carrying “meaning” for our parents, earning “approval” of others. Frankly, that whole narrative is total B.S. I had an incredibly supportive family and yet I still spent years of my life and 10’s of thousands of dollars chasing everyone else’s dream for what I was supposed to become rather than chasing my own. It was when I finally quit that path and pursued my own calling to become a photographer and an entrepreneur that I really felt alive.

This perspective has been instrumental in my life ever since. It felt like waking up from a sleep state… This ‘aha’ moment suddenly helped me become aware and empowered.

Schawbel: There are a lot of photographers online trying to solicit business. How do you think you’ve stood out among them and risen to the top?

Jarvis: This might be the most popular question that I get asked. Probably 10-20 times a week. And my answer is a simple one: Personal Work. Of course you’ve got to be good at your craft – at the fundamentals of being a photographer – in order to become a professional, but that’s really where the technical stuff ends and the standing out begins. The secret weapon – and my raison d’etre – is really creating personal work and sharing it. And my experience says that if you put out a lot of personal work that’s good, it tends to attract high dollar commercial work. But to be clear - I don’t create art to get high dollar projects, I do high dollar projects so I can create more art.

I also intentionally push back against our natural human instincts to fit into a mold, a category, or an expectation. Instead of aspiring to be recognized, I do everything in my power (and I’ll admit this is hard) to listen to my gut. What gets ME up in the morning…that’s where I find answers. Steve Jobs once said that listening to his instincts was his most powerful asset. I can’t say I took my cues from Steve, but in a world where creativity is [finally being] rewarded, I’ve set my sights on being different not just “better”.

So how does that apply in practical terms? I try to create things that expressly carry my thumbprint, my creative DNA. I’ll even go as far as asking myself what can I bring to this project, what kind photo can I take, what kind of idea can I present that no one else could present? What projects allow me to apply my unique skill set, emotions, ideas or talents in a novel way.

For example, that might entail gathering a bunch of musician friends in my studio, serving them dinner and then documenting them as they perform for one another in an insanely intimate environment. To put this in perspective, doing exactly THAT led to me developing a friendship and photographing Ben Haggerty, now famously known as the 15x platinum artist Macklemore. He READ off a piece of paper a few of his now famous songs for the very first time in my studio. THAT sort of thing gets you high value work somewhere down the line because is shows more than just skills at your craft – it shows vision.

Another example of personal work that helped me stand out was this pop-up gallery I created at the Ace Hotel in NYC. With no end in mind I cultivated a collaboration between 10,000 photographers from around the world and displayed the work in the lobby of the legendary Ace. I was able to do that based on the very personal idea that snapshots were more important than masterpieces AND that based on the large community of people I’d grown around my work. Ironically, it was that gallery show that first caused curators from MOMA, The Met, and the New Museum in NYC to track me down and pay attention to my work.

So while doing stuff like the above sounds lofty, in reality it’s not at all – it’s quite simple. It just requires that we find those ideas based on our own, unique life experiences, beliefs, friends, and assets, and then make them happen. Overall, the answers are “in here” [taps on chest] rather than “out there” in the world. Oh…it also turns out that “doing stuff” counts a helluva lot more than “thinking about doing stuff”.

Schawbel: What was your inspiration for creativeLIVE and why do you think it’s taken off like it has? What were the ingredients to making it a success and fulfilling a need in the marketplace?

Jarvis: creativeLIVE was born from the very simple idea that the world deserves access, community & education around the most important and defining capacity we have as human beings – our creativity. Put bluntly, creativity is the new literacy. Certainly we know that Creativity (with a capital C) is art, photography, painting, etc… but we know is much more than art as well. The solution to all problems – no matter what the scale – ultimately requires human creativity at its foundation.

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